As I promised here is my mini-review of The Spectacular Spider-Man on Blu-ray. Sorry for the delay on this but life just gets busy sometimes.

I’m not going to go into detail about the series itself however to sum up my feelings on the overall quality of the show, I’ll quote Bill and Ted, “Excellent!” Far and away this is my favorite anything Spider-Man outside of the comics, the show is pure genius and one that compliments the Spidey mythos with great care and verisimilitude to the original spirit of the character. Take the first 50 issues or so from The Amazing Spider-man comic, then sprinkle in various ideas from other comics throughout his history including The Ultimate Spider-Man as well as ideas from the popular and acclaimed Raimi films and boom, you’ve got yourself TSSM. Throw in an excellent voice cast, Josh Keaton is pitch perfect as Peter and Spidey, smooth animation, and a slick soundtrack and…well, I can’t say enough positive remarks about this show to be honest. I’m dragging on a bit. Let’s move on, shall we?

Please note: I’m not a professional BR critic or expert, just a Spidey fan with a case of amateur videophile disease. Lol.

(TSSM Blu-ray was viewed using a Sony PS3 on a 60” Samsung Plasma PN60F8500AFXZA, with audio supported by an Onkyo 7.1 receiver and supplied by Pioneer speakers.)

Video quality: 4/5
I only watched the first two episodes from season one and also watched various points of those two episodes on DVD after viewing each episode on BR for comparison purposes. It’s very evident as soon as the first episode starts, the transfer is one of high quality. This should come as no surprise though. Sony was the leader in Blu-ray technology and pushing the format to the front of the market and so they have consistently backed up that offering with very solid transfers. Here, the story remains the same. The detail and sharpness in the picture is astounding. It’s so good in fact, that you can actually make out the flaws in the sourced artwork. This is by no means a bad thing in my eyes or a negative requiring a loss of points. It’s a very forgivable incident and doesn’t take away from the overall quality of the picture. The detail is just that good. Shadow detail is excellent with strong, deep, inky blacks and contrast is very serviceable. The real high feature here is the coloring. My god does it looks glorious. I can’t believe it took so long to get this on BR, but thank goodness it’s finally here. The colors are impressive. Saturations are clean, bright and vibrant. It’s a gorgeous vivid picture and the colors are a very marked improvement over the DVD version. Spidey’s suit looks fabulous with the reds and blues coming to life. Now, the negative and the reason why this rates at a 4. Aliasing. Unfortunately, there’s no getting around this and again this might be an affect from the source material but there are several noticeable aliasing throughout those episodes. Mainly, when there’s tight shots on faces. It’s not overly distracting, but it’s there. Otherwise there’s almost no other artifacts. Banding is practically non-existent and no noise was noticed during my viewings.

Audio quality: 4/5
Not much to say here really. The audio has some improvements over the DVD version. The surround sound is mixed well and there’s good use of distance and background elements. Nothing truly spectacular in this but definitely not bad either. It could have used some improvement and tweaking here and there but overall it’s very good. The high point and the reason why I gave it a 4 over say a 3, is the dialogue has been given greater attention. It remains constant throughout whether in a soft scene or one with big action. Spidey’s quips never sounded so good.

Extras: 2/5
These are the same extras found on the DVD versions. I haven’t watched them yet but I was hoping they would have included some other stuff beyond what has already been released. Then again, there’s a chance they might not have included them at all, thus the 2 rating.

Overview:
If you’re a fan of the show nor haven’t seen this and are looking into watching this series, it comes highly recommended from your ol’ friendly UltimateWebhead. Even if you already own a copy of this show on DVD, this is a worthy upgrade. The transfer is very well done and looks great sitting on the shelf too. Alrighty, enjoy and take care.
UW